Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchampwas a French, naturalized American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada, although he was careful about his use of the term Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant...
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth28 July 1887
CityBlainville-Crevon, France
I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art -- and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.
The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.
I wanted to kill art for myself… …a new thought for that object.
In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society
Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.
Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .
I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.
Humor is the only reason to live.
You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)
There is no solution, for there is no problem.
The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.